Hackers have relatively little ability to identify emotionally
with other people. This may be because hackers generally aren't
much like `other people'. Unsurprisingly, hackers also tend
towards self-absorption, intellectual arrogance, and impatience
with people and tasks perceived to be wasting their time.
As cynical as hackers sometimes wax about the amount of idiocy
in the world, they tend by reflex to assume that everyone is as
rational, `cool', and imaginative as they consider themselves.
This bias often contributes to weakness in communication skills.
Hackers tend to be especially poor at confrontation and
negotiation.
Because of their passionate embrace of (what they consider to
be) the Right Thing, hackers
can be unfortunately intolerant and bigoted on technical issues,
in marked contrast to their general spirit of camaraderie and
tolerance of alternative viewpoints otherwise. Old-time ITS partisans look down on the ever-growing
hordes of Unix hackers; Unix
aficionados despise VMS and MS-DOS; and hackers who are used to
conventional command-line user interfaces loudly loathe
mouse-and-menu based systems such as the Macintosh. Hackers who
don't indulge in Usenet consider it
a huge waste of time and bandwidth; fans of old adventure games such
as ADVENT and Zork consider MUDs to
be glorified chat systems devoid of atmosphere or interesting
puzzles; hackers who are willing to devote endless hours to
Usenet or MUDs consider IRC to be a
real waste of time; IRCies think MUDs might be okay if
there weren't all those silly puzzles in the way. And, of course,
there are the perennial holy
wars -- EMACS vs. vi, big-endian vs.
little-endian, RISC vs. CISC,
etc., etc., etc. As in society at large, the intensity and
duration of these debates is usually inversely proportional to
the number of objective, factual arguments available to buttress
any position.
As a result of all the above traits, many hackers have
difficulty maintaining stable relationships. At worst, they can
produce the classic computer
geek: withdrawn, relationally incompetent, sexually
frustrated, and desperately unhappy when not submerged in his or
her craft. Fortunately, this extreme is far less common than
mainstream folklore paints it -- but almost all hackers will
recognize something of themselves in the unflattering paragraphs
above.
Hackers are often monumentally disorganized and sloppy about
dealing with the physical world. Bills don't get paid on time,
clutter piles up to incredible heights in homes and offices, and
minor maintenance tasks get deferred indefinitely.
1994-95's fad behavioral disease was a syndrome called
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), supposedly characterized by
(among other things) a combination of short attention span with
an ability to `hyperfocus' imaginatively on interesting tasks. In
1998-1999 another syndrome that is said to overlap with many
hacker traits entered popular awareness: Asperger's syndrome
(AS). This disorder is also sometimes called `high-function
autism', though researchers are divided on whether AS is in fact
a mild form of autism or a distinct syndrome with a different
etiology. AS patients exhibit mild to severe deficits in
interpreting facial and body-language cues and in modeling or
empathizing with others' emotions. Though some AS patients
exhibit mild retardation, others compensate for their deficits
with high intelligence and analytical ability, and frequently
seek out technical fields where problem-solving abilities are at
a premium and people skills are relatively unimportant. Both
syndromes are thought to relate to abnormalities in
neurotransmitter chemistry, especially the brain's processing of
serotonin.
Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a
tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in
personality, especially those variations that make life more
complicated for authority figures and conformists. Thus, hackers
aware of the issue tend to be among those questioning whether ADD
and AS actually exist; and if so whether they are really
`diseases' rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation
like having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case,
they have a sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are
over-diagnosed and over-treated. After all, people in authority
will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or
citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists - thus, any
social system that depends on authority relationships will tend
to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such `abnormal'
people until they are properly docile and stupid and
`well-socialized'.
So hackers tend to believe they have good reason for
skepticism about clinical explanations of the hacker personality.
That being said, most would also concede that some hacker traits
coincide with indicators for ADD and AS - the status of caffeeine
as a hacker beverage of choice may be connected to the fact that
it bonds to the same neural receptors as Ritalin, the drug most
commonly prescribed for ADD. It is probably true that boosters of
both would find a rather higher rate of clinical ADD among
hackers than the supposedly mainstream-normal 3-5% (AS is rarer
and there are not yet good estimates of incidence as of
2000).
Node:Miscellaneous, Previous:Weaknesses of the
Hacker Personality, Up:Appendix B